$150,000 in penalties for WA couple

The former operators of a café and a delicatessen in Western
Australia's South-West have been penalised more than $150,000 for
deliberately underpaying employees, after eight workers were found
to have been short-changed a total of $20,036.

The penalties, imposed in the Federal Circuit Court, are the
result of the Fair Work Ombudsman initiating legal proceedings
relating to the Dalycious Delicatessen at Dalyellup and the Hidden
Gem café at Bunbury.

Married WA couple Gemma and Mark Gumley have been penalised
$12,000 and $3,000 respectively and Mr Gumley's company Koojedda
Carpentry Pty Ltd, which formerly operated the delicatessen and the
café at Bunbury, has been penalised $139,995. The company's
penalties were imposed in respect of 14 different contraventions.
Mr Gumley was involved in two of these and Ms Gumley was involved
in all but one of the company's contraventions.

As Koojedda Carpentry is no longer trading, has no known assets
and is unlikely to back-pay the workers, Judge Antoni Lucev ordered
that the Gumleys' individual penalties be paid to the workers to
help rectify the underpayments.

All eight underpaid workers performed work at the Hidden Gem
café, with two staff, both chefs, also performing some work at the
Dalycious Delicatessen. Both businesses ceased trading last
year.

The eight employees variously performed between two and 16 weeks
of work between June 2013 and September 2014.

Six of the employees were not paid at all for various period of
work performed. One employee aged 19 was paid less than half of her
lawful entitlements, not being paid for approximately 5 weeks of
her 11 week employment period and receiving between $14.06 and
19.69 per hour when she was paid.

The company also contravened workplace laws by failing to
provide employees with payslips on a regular basis and by failing
to provide any documents in response to Notices to Produce issued
by the Fair Work Ombudsman.

As a result, the Fair Work Ombudsman largely had to rely on
employees' own records, bank accounts and the limited payslips
provided to establish the underpayments.